Sapir's account of the early twentieth-century opening up of the field of linguistics to other disciplines is doubly relevant to the theme of this essay, namely the possibility of establishing links between Joyce's fiction and contemporaneous linguistic preoccupations. First, it suggests that an important epistemological change was taking place in linguistics as much as in literature (a change bearing not only on their procedures but also on their relationship to other worlds of discourse). Second, if one substitutes the words ‘Joycean scholar’ and ‘Joyce’ for ‘modern linguist’ and ‘linguistics’ in Sapir's proposition, the result is an equally correct summary of the fertile crossbreeding to which Joyce's fiction has been subjected ever since the publication of Ulysses. The relevance of this fiction to its scientific and cultural environment asserts itself through the numerous links which theoreticians and writers working on Joyce have established with the main cognitive paradigms of the day. Famous early examples are Jung's (somewhat misguided) reading of Ulysses as the embodiment of a schizophrenic mind (JJ 628), and Wyndham Lewis's attack on the same book as a literary equivalent to Freud's and Einstein's theories.